《 𝓯𝓵𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓫𝓪𝓬𝓴 ᵐᵃʸ ¹⁰ᵗʰ, ²⁰²⁰ 》
Lev’s brother often joked that Lev put on his ‘Big Bad shoes’ when Valencia needed him — which was almost every night. Despite the fact that he would always roll his eyes and smack the back of the younger Yegorov’s neck in response, it wasn’t really a far-fetched comment. Stepping inside the pit meant harnessing every bit of anger, despair, violence and control that had forged, shaped and hurt him. When he stepped out of it, however, he had to leave it all behind. He had to focus on the good things ahead or else he’d lose his damn mind. When Lev wasn’t a Bone Breaker, he was a guy who grabbed life by the throat, seized each day without thinking ahead into his future and accessed control only when he deemed it to be absolutely necessary.
He hated every inch of his brain that told him Rowan’s case was an absolutely necessary situation.
For every second he ignored that voice, the louder it screamed back at him, warning him that nothing could come out of this in the long run except the ruin of a lifetime long friendship and the staining of the best thing that’d happened to him in a long while. You can’t keep anyone around you. Not for long. Not like this. That peace of mind that Rowan offered him… He couldn’t bask in it, for he knew that the blackness of his lifestyle ( a lifestyle he could never escape if he tried, not with his blood and last name tying him to it for life ), embedded into his soul, would inevitably ruin it; ruin them. The hard truth that would accompany him for the rest of his life was that he’d picked a path with no return many years ago, without fully grasping all of the good things he’d miss. With the way things were, the way the organization was run, it meant that, when push came to shove, he had to prioritize Valencia’s needs over his partner’s. He didn’t want to fuck things up with her, which was why he had to hit the breaks before they reached a point of no return.
If only she didn’t make taking a step back so…damn…difficult. He leaned into her touch as if he’d felt it a million times before. His shoulders released some of their tension, loosening in a way that usually happened after he crashed into his bed. She’d always had that calming effect on him — a constant he could look to when everything around him became way too crazy. He used to be weirded out by how she seemed to know what was on his mind most of the time, but he’d grown to embrace it and become completely charmed by it; along with everything else about her. “You watch our thought process?” he echoed in jest whilst putting the plate back on the hood next to where her hips then sat. He’d left two for her — he wasn’t some greedy monster after all. She could claim the particular ones were made the previous day all she pleased and he’d let her, but they were too warm and soft for that to be true. “D’you watch mine, too? ‘Cause you know…that’s dangerous,” he mused. “How do I know you won’t go to the enemy with that vital information?” The tone in his voice teasing, the gleam of his eyes taunting as he offered a mischievous grin down at her. With his body standing in front of the hood and her feet dangling over it, it’d be so easy to close the distance between them completely — like he’d done the past couple of times they were left alone. The same fingers that had wrapped around necks like a tight vice, wrapped gently around the thin wrist of her creamy hand.
His head almost turned into her touch. His bruised lips almost planted a tender kiss on the pulse point. The more he looked into her inviting, warm gaze, the simpler it seemed to lean down and claim her lips. Instead, after a moment of inner struggle that had to be reflected on the disappointed and anxious expression of his facial features, he slowly pulled her hand down; away from his face. “Listen… I, uh—wanted to talk to you about somethin’; This,” he specified by jesturing between the two of them. Us.
《 𝓯𝓵𝓪𝓼𝓱𝓫𝓪𝓬𝓴 ᵐᵃʸ ¹⁰ᵗʰ, ²⁰²⁰ 》
“I do.” Rowan spoke through laughs, smacking his shoulder playfully. “Like this…” She whispered, a delicate finger tracing his eyebrow once again by memory, her eyes drifting toward his lips instead. “The guy you were fighting…when he’s considering a right hook he takes a half step back for he does it. I saw it coming.” Something about the way she spoke was sultry, like what she was saying was intimate despite how she reared back to mimic his opposition. “Of course I do. I’ve seen you fight more than I have anyone else…I won’t tell you what I see though…I don’t want you to overthink it.” She gave a small laugh, distance closing just slightly between them as she leaned forward onto her free palm that laid flat next to the remaining cookies, shoulders squeezed into a shrug. “You don’t know. Y’know, I think that might be up to you to not give me a reason to go to the enemy with my intel.” The brunette met his tease with her own, a wicked grin crossing lips that were just dying to claim his own–until she was stopped dead in her tracks.
And then it was loud again, her brain giving her no less than a baker’s dozen directives on how to get out, to stop the train wreck of words that were about to slip his lips. Words he probably thought he would be the first to say, words he probably thought were unique to him, words he probably didn’t realize she saw coming form the second the anxious hesitation crossed his face. As he pulled her hand from his face, she pulled it from his grasp and into her lap, her eyes growing dark like the pine forests she’d rather be lost in than face the inevitability of their conversation. She’d had this conversation with a quarter dozen men from the time she was a teenager to now, sparing Serafin whose words veered sideways into her being a secret. Her identity as a person again trumped by her identity as Damien’s sister. She loved being Damien’s sister, they were closer than any other sibling pair she knew, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed when people couldn’t see that her personhood was more complex than that.
And that made her feel like a fool. A fool for thinking even for a second that because it had been different for her that it had been for him too. Just because he quieted her brain didn’t mean she did anything for him. It was like she had been dropped from a magnetic field, eyes that had been bound together by an invisible force causing them to search each other out when their energies crossed, now drifting. Rowan’s eyes fell from his, hovering somewhere between the the peaks of his cheek bones and his collar bone, her head falling to the side. The dark haired woman squared her shoulders as if bracing herself for impact, sitting up a little straighter as to not feel like the small child these conversations tended to make her feel like. “I’m listening” She breathed out, as if she hadn’t just hardened before his eyes. “What’s on your mind?” They both had to know that she already knew the answer to that, despite how desperately she tried to iron out the emotion in her words as she spoke.
The writer in her had already drawn their conversation to a close, assumed the ending and was mourning the potential the pages never met--and it showed. Her mind was racing 8 different ways, one seeming to venture into the parts of her brain she had done everything she could to bar access to. Maybe it was a good thing--at least this time she would walk away knowing she hadn’t fucked it up. He hadn’t given her a chance to. The opposite had happened with Raf, having dragged on far longer than its expiration, she had fucked up fifty different ways before he turned his back on her.
